


come away, slip away, fall away

by fightingtheblankpage



Series: prompt fills [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 18:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightingtheblankpage/pseuds/fightingtheblankpage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The prompt by danu_mactire was simply “Peter/Lydia; Time travel”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come away, slip away, fall away

When Lydia is twenty-two, she slips out of time.

It’s on her birthday, perhaps the last sunny day of Autumn. Lydia is thinking about how she liked the sound of being twenty-one, and about growing up, and maybe also about missed chances.

So it’s a warm afternoon; a very mundane afternoon. She’s just driving back home from a last minute grocery run, and the traffic isn’t so bad. The radio is on, and actually, the peculiar static that echoes in the speakers is the first thing that alerts Lydia that something’s amiss.

The second is the sudden silence. The kind that feels tingly in your ears.

The third thing that alerts Lydia is how suddenly everything freezes, even the glow of the sun, and Lydia is slamming her brakes, trying not to hit the car in front of her. The air around her is saturated with gold, and looks like it should be thick as a syrup. When Lydia gets out of the car, it even smells sweetly.

The absence of time tastes like candy on her tongue.

She looks around, and she feels oddly calm. At peace with this world of no movement. Lydia turns around, and maybe her foot catches on something, or maybe she trips, or maybe nothing gives at all, but that’s when she slips for the very first time.

***

When Lydia slips into the past, it’s never to places she recognizes from history lessons. She doesn’t get to see the coronations and battles, ground-shattering revolutions, magnificent discoveries. Instead she sees snippets of human lives, everyday and simple, and so very, very unique in how every human life is ultimately the same. Even hers.

Once she arrives near a river, and it’s a chilly Spring morning, exactly _not_ like on her birthday. She shields her eyes from the sun, and there he is, a silhouette on the other side of the river. He’s an intruder, a tourist just like her, in clothes from the wrong period. He smiles at her, languid like an Autumn afternoon.

“Hello,” he says to her, raising his hand in a greeting. Lydia says nothing, because she knows about good manners, but she doesn’t know about the time travelling etiquette. “Would you like to go with me now?”

The rives is separating them, and more importantly, Lydia doesn’t know this man. She wants to tell him as much, but before she has a chance, she’s slipping away again.

***

Lydia starts seeing the man everywhere after that, and at the same time she doesn’t see him at all.

She thinks maybe he’s something the same part of her brain that makes her capable of time travel has come up with for her benefit. Her own brain is giving her a companion in those sugar-sweet moments of wonder.

Lydia doesn’t see the man, but he leaves traces for her. Sometimes she speaks with people she sees on her travels, and they mention him. She follows his footsteps in the sand of the 10th century beach in Scandinavia, and finds his scarf wrapped around a tree branch in a forest two hundred years in the future, when she appears there completely unprepared to find snow and biting cold.

But the man himself never shows his face.

***

When Lydia slips into the future, it’s always mostly empty. This has worried her at first, that the world seems to end at some point, but Lydia can still visit the ruins. Then she came to dread those trips, and the way the fine hair at the nape of her neck stand on end from the feeling of being _the last one_ or _the only one_. Lydia has grown up to be a person of solitude, but not of loneliness.

That’s where she meets the man again, as real as he can be, in his black coat and with his syrup-sweet smile. He’s waiting for her, sitting on the steps leading to a building that Lydia thinks was once a library, before the nature has reclaimed it.

There is no barrier between them now, in either sense, and so Lydia asks, “Who are you?” and then she cringes at her own bluntness. Perhaps time travel has made her out of touch with social interactions.

The man makes a vague gesture, twirling his finger in the air. “I’m the same as you, dear,” he says. He gets to his feet, and rearranges his coat so that the lapels are perfectly straight. “You may say we share a certain, ah, mind-set.”

“I’m asking about your _name_ ,” Lydia says briskly, and the man actually laughs. His laughter isn’t sweet at all.

“The name is Peter. And you are Lydia. Clever, clever Lydia.” He offers her a hand, and Lydia doesn’t take it. “Wouldn’t you like to go with me?”

Lydia shakes her head. She slips away deliberately, because there is a ‘yes’ on her lips, even as she tries to force it down.

***

Peter is never in the past, but he’s always in the future now.

Even when she doesn’t see him, Lydia knows he’s there, right on the edge of her consciousness, just like time is another sense of hers. The uneasy feeling is gone, though, and Lydia knows that if she were to scream at the top of her lungs, Peter would come.

The world from the future is no longer empty.

***

There are many things Lydia will never understand. She doesn’t know how she can slip out of time just like that, or why it happens. She knows about quantum physics, and m-spaces, and science holds almost no mysteries to her anymore. But science is impersonal, and it doesn’t tell you why you. Why out of the whole universe, of infinite possibilities, of multitude of stars and planets and black holes and suns – _you_.

Or why _him_.

What she doesn’t know is whether it’s Peter who is chasing her, or Lydia who is chasing him. Lydia is a rational woman, despite everything that has happened, and so she thinks of the simplest solution to that.

She has to stop running.

***

They meet on a sunny Autumn afternoon of Lydia’s twenty-second birthday.

Lydia stands in a shade of a tree by the road, and watches herself slip out of time for the first time. Peter is there, too; he appears next to her, slips out from between shadows and moments, and then he’s there, solid and grounded, a cut-out against the golden glow of timeless light and candy sweet air of that stationary second.

“This is where I chose you,” he says.

Lydia is thinking about how she used to be someone else, and about time turning in circles, and maybe also about missed chances.

“Let’s try this again, then,” Lydia says, and takes his hand.


End file.
